“You’re an interesting sort of ice dragoness,” I commented. “You seem quite hard—but you must not be, really. Not if you’ve attracted the affections of a fire dragon.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Merulina insisted again. Her pace quickened as we approached the wash room. “But if I did, would you say that Altair was faring well enough without me—I mean, not me specifically—but without any additional help? From anyone? In general?”
I smirked. Poor Merulina. It must have been hard for her. She couldn’t openly care about Altair’s fate, but there it was. “Altair was doing well last I saw him. Even without ‘additional help’ from ‘anyone in general.’”
“What are you doing with your fingers?”
“They’re called air-quotes. On Earth, people make them whenever they don’t really believe the words they’re saying.”
Merulina glared at me, her porcelain complexion easily betraying a blush creeping over her cheeks. We ducked into the wash room with our brooms and pans, but none of these tools were put to work. The instant that the door clapped shut behind us, Merulina thrust the dust pan and broom to the tile, gripped my neck and sent me floundering into the wall. “Do not speak so flippantly of the fire prince. Explain these air-quotes to me at once! Do you or do you not believe that Altair Aena fares well in the dungeon? Do not be coy, human! I have not seen him in days! You do not want to tempt me—”
“Excuse me?” I spluttered around the grip of her hand. “Did you say… Altair Aena? The fire prince?”
Her frigid fingers squeezed my wind pipe and I gurgled.
“I said do not be coy!”
I shook my head frantically and she released me; I collapsed onto the tile, still sprayed with shards of porcelain, coughing and cringing at the stinging sensation in my palms and knees. “I’m not being coy,” I cried. “He was safe last I saw him—and I had no idea that he was a member of the royal family.”
Merulina scoffed. “How could you be so uneducated toward the land on which your feet rest?”
I pursed my lips. “You know I am human,” I reminded her, “like the ice queen. We both came from Earth at the same time. There is still much I do not know regarding the ways of your people. Especially…” Especially the fire dragons. In all truth, I knew more about the ice dragons than the fire. I had spent more time here than with Theon and his family. I hadn’t even known he’d had a brother. How could he have never mentioned something like that? But, as I scoured my memory, I turned up just as little about his mother and father. I truly had no idea what his childhood had been like. “Especially the fire dragons.” I was Theon’s wife—and I hadn’t even known he had a brother. One imprisoned in this castle, no less.
“Fire dragons are far and away beautiful,” Merulina allowed, “but none are quite as captivating as the men of the Aena lineage. Though I risk my head for saying as much, and you are never to repeat those words. That is how you can know Altair Aena. He… is… beautiful.”
“Um,” I said, my eyes finally lifting to meet hers, “I know exactly what you mean.”
Merulina smoldered. “Stand up,” she snapped. Ah, the ice dragons. Although they had moments of cruelty and kindness to varying degrees, much like actual humans, they seemed to be uniformly of the jealous sort. “That’s enough. I’m sure you two got quite cozy in your cells—”
“No, no,” I assured her, pulling myself to my feet. The layers of my servant gown had protected my knees, save an errant sliver or two, but my hands had not been so lucky. Beads of blood blossomed across both palms, and I went to the sink to disinfect the meager wounds. “He told me about you. He seemed to think that you would be coming. That I might have the chance to meet you, if I stayed.”
I saw Merulina’s face in the mirror. It softened. “That was sweet of him,” she whispered, “to keep hoping like that. But… Dorid suspected that I was developing feelings for Altair. She’s sharp. She had my shift exchanged with another servant. Now my route does not take me into the dungeons anymore. It’s been days since we’ve seen one another.”
I hesitated. Did I want to trust another of the ice people? Lethe had proven to be useless in that department, and the last thing I needed was another person who would be happy to take advantage of my friendship, and to cast me asunder in the event that I became a liability.
“Maybe I could help you,” I said tentatively. Call it my curse to be compelled to extend a helping hand, no matter how many times I found myself later bitten.
Merulina shook her head and busied herself with sweeping. “I doubt it,” she muttered. “No one can help me. No one can help either one of us.” Her eyes, still cold, turned up toward me as she centered a cluster of tinkling porcelain shards at her feet. “What are you going to do? End the war? Unite our peoples?”
I grimaced. “No, I’m probably not going to end the war and unite your peoples—though if I felt that I could, I would certainly try. No. I mean that I could help you, maybe, in the short term. I could keep lookout while you visit with Altair.”
Merulina’s eyes narrowed. “You might get caught,” she said.
“I know that.”
“There’s nothing in it for you.”
“Yes. That’s true.”
Merulina sighed, and her shoulders sagged. “Why would you do anything to help me? You don’t even know me. In fact—for the gods’ sake—if you turned me in to Dorid right now for all that I have said, you’d probably find your station in the servant quarters increased.”
“Obviously,” I agreed. “But again, I’m human.” I smiled and felt my own heart warm with the words. “And I guess we can’t help but believe in the triumph of love.” Even my foolish mom and dad, and all the mistakes they made. I suddenly wanted to see them, and to see Theon. But helping Merulina see Altair would have to suffice. “And besides,” I went on, “any friend of the Aena dynasty is a friend of mine.” I extended my hand and allowed her to see the simple golden band which adorned one finger. Upon close inspection, it bore the crest of Aena: a fireball.
Merulina inspected the piece of jewelry, and her eyes flew to mine.
“Are you…?”
I nodded, almost certain of the question.
“The wife of Theon Aena?” Merulina finished in a whisper so low it was almost inaudible.
I nodded again, and a deep red blush rushed to the servant girl’s cheeks. “Oh, gods, I had no idea!” she cried, bowing her head. “Forgive me for how brisk I’ve been—I didn’t realize…” Brisk was a gentle word for it. “I didn’t realize I was speaking with—with—”
“The future queen?” I suggested, strangely invigorated by the words. I didn’t think I had ever said them aloud before.
“My lover’s sister-in-law!” Merulina corrected me, smothering her face into the palms of her hands and shaking her head. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t even think—I didn’t know—”
I smiled at the girl. It wasn’t her fault. I understood that the ice dragons were a little more, ahem, guarded than the fire dragons. This was a quality which the fire dragons lacked. But she had every right to feel that way. If she was in love with a fire dragon—and not just any fire dragon, but Theon’s brother—then she was surrounded by enemies here.
“It doesn’t matter,” I assured her. “Let’s finish this up, find some bandages for my hand, and go down into the dungeons for a little while. I’ll be your lookout. I really don’t mind; I know how much it would’ve meant to me if anyone had been there to help me when I was trapped in this palace, pretending to be something I wasn’t.”
Merulina cocked her head at me. “When you were trapped in the palace, pretending to be something you weren’t? You mean… right now?”
We collected the porcelain piles into our dust pans and walked. “No,” I answered. “Before I married Theon, I was kidnapped by Lethe and kept in the palace. We almost got married.” I sighed and shook my head. “It’s a long story.”
Theon
Parnassia ret
urned to her people after I had returned to mine. I slumbered beneath the morning sun, as our sojourn had kept me up most of the night. My mind then turned repeatedly to Penelope.
“We take what we’ve been given, and we forge what our heart needs in order to survive,” she told me, again and again in my dreams.
“But—” I felt myself thrash and twist at the idea that it was not the will of the gods which determined where every grain of sand fell. There had to be some other way. Some way to be happy, and to follow the path that had been laid out for me my entire life. “But what if we can change it?”
“Theon… Theon.” Her eyes were clear and bright with pain. I thought of the sky over The Hearthlands—now Everwinter. Luminous. Opaque. And so low. “What if we can’t?” she asked. “What if we can’t change it?”
When I awoke, I still couldn’t get the conversation out of my head. The sun over the ogres’ island was cheerful, the palm trees whispering in the breeze, the ocean roaring and rolling toward our camp. The ogres feared us too much to disturb us, and it was a pleasant place to have relocated.
But it wasn’t home.
“Theon.” My mother’s familiar voice interrupted my drift through half-sleep. “You were gone all the morning. No one could say where you were. It would have been easy to believe you were dead, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “You know how I am.”
I didn’t have to see her to know that she was grimacing. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”
I liked to act in solitude. That was my way. I didn’t like to report to anyone as if they were a superior, even a member of my family. Altair was the same way. Perhaps raising us boys with such confidence and courage had, in some respects, backfired on Mother and Father.
“Should I even bother to ask where you went?” she prodded.
“Not yet,” I answered. “Mother… do you ever think that The Hearthlands are just lost? That it is simply not our land any longer, and that we should make peace with that?”
“Theon.” Her tone changed to that of discipline. That tone would precede a lashing when I was a boy. “The Hearthlands are our home. Not just our home—our destiny. Our rightful place. We will reclaim them. We must. It is in the stars.”
I sighed and tilted my head away from her, almost with shame. “But it’s not,” I said. “It’s not in the stars. If it was in the stars, we would know it. We would find it under our feet without any effort. And that’s not happening. Even Einhen—the last time we were out at night, in our country—said he could hardly see the stars, but he knew that they had changed position to no longer favor our advantage.”
“What are you suggesting, Theon? For the sake of the gods, speak plainly. What do you want? To relocate? Shall we just take over the ogres’ island, and deem it The New Hearthlands? Is that what you want? To give up?”
“No!” I lurched up from where I had been lying in the sand. Mother swung into view, eyes shining and mouth stern. “I just wonder if, perhaps, an unending faith and patience in the powers that be is the correct course, when it seems that the winds have changed and we are only being blown further and further from the island.”
“I’m open to any new ideas you want to propose,” Mother said.
“That’s not true. When I took men and ran reconnaissance on the city, you didn’t want me to go. You wanted to stay and wait in the shelter. And when we were driven from the shelter by the ice people, you didn’t want to stay on the land—”
“We couldn’t have! The weather changed!” Mother cried. “You know what the cold does to us. Though our fire continues to burn hot, our muscles and bones stiffen and slow. We become statues in such heavy storms!”
“We could have stayed and fought until the weather changed,” I reminded her. It wasn’t in me to truly fight with my mother, whom I loved so dearly, who was the last remaining piece of my family to whom I could cling, save Penelope. But we needed to talk about this. We needed to talk about the fire dragon way, and how it might not have been as productive in war as… the human way. “You flew with our survivors away from the island before the first snowflake even fell, when Nell and I alone forged into the city. Admit it, Mother. You do not want to fight. Why?”
“Because it is not our place to fight! We were the born leaders of that land. The natural leaders of that land! And it will be returned to us, just as it was during the insurgence of Emperor Bram—”
“An insurgency which took almost all our females,” I noted darkly. “It was not the tale of fated triumph you imagine. We relinquish something great every time we decide to let the tide take us where it will.” My thoughts turned to Nell. What might have happened to us if I had listened to Pythia? If I had fallen in love with Michelle? My heart turned cold at the fantasy of our separate futures.
Mother dropped her head into her hands, so that I could no longer see her eyes. I winced. Dear gods, I had made her cry. I was a terrible dragon. “I don’t want to lose any more of our men,” she confessed. “I’ve lost your father and your brother… and you disappeared again… you want to go back and fight again…”
I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “There must be sacrifice in a real fight. What are we willing to relinquish, Mother?” I stepped forward and braced her shoulders in my hands. Her face came up from her palms, two wet tracks down either cheek. “What are we willing to let go of?” I whispered.
“Nothing,” she replied.
My jaw clenched. “Then your only option is to wait for the wind and the tide to change of their own choice. But I am willing to sacrifice a dream of perfection for the reality of happiness that I know with her.”
Mother frowned up at me. “With her?” she asked.
I winced. “I… We found out that Penelope is infertile.”
Mother touched my cheek tenderly. “Oh, son,” she said, her voice low and warm with compassion. “We always hoped that you would fall deeply enough in love one day to marry—but Erisard and I were unsure it would ever happen. Your standards were so high, your dreams so lofty; you hardly seemed to notice the lack of eligible females until much later in life. Although it is, of course, part of a dynasty to propagate an heir… You are happy with her, and what dynasty are we now? Don’t live for a kingdom you can’t even enter. What sense does that—” Mother blinked hard as she spoke. “What purpose is a perfection you cannot touch, a dream? We may lose… some things… but happiness… happiness, we must take back. We can start simple. Forget the grandeur of the castle. Start simple. Just the land. The land itself. That’s all we need. Somewhere to start. Somewhere to build.”
“Everyone!” I hollered to all the dragons on the beach. Those who were currently in our settlement roused from their activities at the sound of my voice. “Gather around! We are taking up a collection of ideas. Nothing is too big or too small!”
For the next few hours, we gathered close and conversed. Many ideas needed to be dismissed. Conventional warfare was not an option for us. We could not manage a battle on foot with the same ease as the ice dragons; we would only decimate our own population. “But you flew in the snow,” Einhen reminded me. “Some of us are large enough, strong enough, to manage. And I—I can read the skies. Tonight, I will consult them again, and may determine the temperamental patterns of Everwinter’s sky.”
“Do not use that name!” Mother commanded. “It is not Everwinter. They are The Hearthlands! Forever!”
I put my arm around her shoulder, but reminded her, “As long as the people of that palace call the island Everwinter… that is its name. If we want to change that—we mustn’t pretend anything. We must take it back and change its name ourselves.”
Mother pursed her lips.
“And we can all walk in the cold… for a while,” Charis added, drawing the discussion back toward a plan.
“That’s right,” I said.
We went on to consider weaponry. Much of our store had been depleted when the shelter was ransacked.
“What good is the wind to a fire
dragon?” an older dragon demanded to know.
“We do always have our fire,” I said, expelling one single flame into the air before me. But, as the gods would have it, the warm breeze off the sea carried the flame away, landing the little twinkle of light amid some dry reeds which had been used to buffer a lean-to on our camp. I jolted with alarm as the spark caught, and the fire spread quickly—too quickly for the saltwater to be of any aid—to consume the simple shack and leave one of our number homeless… again. Of course, we were homeless at the moment, too, so what did these trifling buildings matter?
“Still, let’s put it out,” Mother said, glumly approaching with a large pot of ocean water. “If it spreads, we’ll lose the entire camp.”
And, just like that, another spark was ignited. But this little twinkle of light was not on the wind. It was in my mind.
“Of course,” I breathed. “Our fire. And the city itself.”
No one understood what the enigmatic phrases, side by side, could have meant. “What are you talking about?” Mother asked.
“We cannot move in the cold, but fire can move in the cold. Fire can burn in the cold, as long as it doesn’t get wet. We would need to time it right. But, Einhen, you said you would consult the skies tonight?”
“I grabbed up my equipment when we fled the shelter,” Einhen agreed. “It hasn’t been unpacked yet, but yes, of course. I’ve been meaning to return to the stars for more answers. It just… seemed so hopeless for a while.”
“You will be able to see the patterns of the clouds,” I said. “You could ascertain the window of a storm. They come and go, don’t they? The snowfall is not constant.”
“That’s right,” Einhen said. “We traveled in it ourselves. There are sometimes entire nights without—”
“How will the fire move in the cold without us?” Mother asked, sensing the direction in which I was taking our group. “Does our element no longer require us to control its destructive powers?”
“But it really doesn’t, you know,” I said. “It never did. Fire has a mind of its own. You saw what it just did to that lean-to. I didn’t command that.”
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